from the urls-we-dig-up dept

If you're looking forward to watching The Martian movie, you probably enjoy watching rockets blast off into space and seeing big explosions. However, really long distance space travel could be much less entertaining without rockets unless you like looking at the glow of an ion thruster. Spacecraft using the momentum of light won't even glow, but they could be part of more and more space ships. Check out a few of these projects.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Materials made of carbon are amazingly useful. We've pointed out various cool things that graphene can do before, but the list really seems to go on and on (even though there are less than a handful of products on the market that actually incorporate graphene). Still, graphene could improve a lot of things, and material science often takes decades to really establish a market for a specific material. Check out these links... and maybe in 30 years or so, we'll finally get to see some of these things.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Carbon gets a lot of negative publicity because it's associated with carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, but the element itself is critical to life and has numerous fascinating properties. Carbon comes in a variety of allotropes, and we're discovering other carbon-based structures all the time. Here are just a few more examples.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Water would be a great fuel -- if only there were thermodynamically-possible ways to extract energy from it. Water is a pretty stable compound, and it's difficult to retrieve the energy required to break its bonds. Electrolysis can break water into hydrogen and oxygen, but burning the hydrogen doesn't produce a net gain of energy. But there may be some creative ways around this problem, and some folks have actually made progress in using water (or saltwater) in an energy-generating system.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Carbon is an incredible element. It comes in the form of diamond, but it also forms other allotropes such as nanofoam, carbyne chains, buckyballs and chaoite. Carbon also make graphene, and that's a material that could have a lot of potential, if we can figure out how to make large quantities of it economically. Here are just a few properties of graphene.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There's plenty of water on our planet, but unfortunately for us, not all of that water is drinkable or easily obtained. A whole ocean of water is even locked away underground trapped in minerals that we hopefully won't need to tap into for fresh water. However, drought conditions could get worse, so we might have to explore more exotic ways of getting potable water. Here are just a few desalination technologies that might become useful soon.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Some animals, like cats, can see much better in the dark than us humans. (However, cats can't see in total darkness, they just need about a sixth of the light our eyes need to see.) Other animals, like bats, use echolocation to "see" without any light at all. Some people have figured out how to use echolocation, but until we start genetically engineering our eyeballs to be more like a cat's eye, we'll have to use special cameras and sensors to see in low light situations (barring the use of flashlights). Here are just a few examples of some night vision tech.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The term wireless is a bit strange because it classifies a whole range of modern technology by the lack of a wire. Cordless technologies are getting better all the time, but the reliability and transfer speeds of wires are still superior in many ways. Thankfully, there are plenty of folks working on making wireless equipment that is faster and smaller, pushing the capabilities of wireless transmissions to make mobile devices better and better. Here are just a few notable milestones.

from the keeping-the-legal-profession-employed dept

Slashdot points us to an interview with Andre Geim, who won this year's Nobel Prize for physics for his work on graphene. As part of the interview, they asked him about patenting graphene:

You haven't yet patented graphene. Why is that?

We considered patenting; we prepared a patent and it was nearly filed. Then I had an interaction with a big, multinational electronics company. I approached a guy at a conference and said, "We've got this patent coming up, would you be interested in sponsoring it over the years?" It's quite expensive to keep a patent alive for 20 years. The guy told me, "We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long term. If after ten years we find it's really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us." That's a direct quote.

I considered this arrogant comment, and I realized how useful it was. There was no point in patenting graphene at that stage. You need to be specific: you need to have a specific application and an industrial partner. Unfortunately, in many countries, including this one, people think that applying for a patent is an achievement. In my case it would have been a waste of taxpayers' money.

It's certainly not an anti-patent statement (he sounds like he'd happily patent some uses of graphene), but it is illustrative of how companies view patents these days.